Getting Their Groove Back, With Help From the Magic of Dance

Participants who have Parkinsons disease at a dance class taught by the Mark Morris Group.Credit
Kitra Cahana for The New York Times

David Leventhal, a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, is teaching a combination from Mr. Morris’s “Three Russian Preludes” to a crammed class of dance students. “Mark made this for Baryshnikov,” he tells them. “Then I danced it. Now you’re the third people to learn it.”

The students laugh. They are not young, not lithe, not professional dancers. Most have Parkinson’s disease; several walk or stand with difficulty. But after watching Mr. Leventhal carefully as they copy his slicing arm movements, the group performs a commendable version of the sequence.

As improbable as it may seem to those familiar with the disease’s toll on motor functions — impaired balance, tremors, slowness of movement, rigidity — this dance class is not a toned-down therapy session. It is both physically demanding and artistically exacting. “Sharp, then soft,” Mr. Leventhal calls out as the students dance in the airy studio at the Mark Morris Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “Like clouds across the stage.”

Exercise has long been considered beneficial for those with Parkinson’s, which is medically defined as a movement disorder caused at least in part by a loss of brain cells that release the nerve-to-nerve signaling chemical dopamine. But the daily physical difficulties patients experience, along with attendant isolation and depression, often result in a sedentary lifestyle and dependence on medication.

Such were the observations of Olie Westheimer, who in 2000 started a support group for Parkinson’s patients and their caregivers at the request of her husband, Dr. Ivan Bodis-Wollner, director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders Center in Kings County Hospital Center and SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

“I could see there was a mismatch between what was written about the disease — it’s not going to kill you, you have to live with it — and how treatment works,” said Ms. Westheimer, who is the outreach coordinator for the Parkinson’s center and has become a passionate advocate of dance as treatment for movement disorders. “What happens is that people aren’t living with the disease, they are defined by it, and their lives are a round of doctors’ appointments and therapy. Even a support group is part of that world, and I felt like they should be doing something else.”

Ms. Westheimer, who had seriously studied dance when she was growing up, also noticed that some Parkinson’s patients were using techniques similar to dancers’ to master or memorize movement. “They would describe how they would put a hand on the wall or another person as a cue to turn, or play familiar music in their heads to get up, or start walking again if they froze. I thought, ‘They need to dance!’ ”

Soon after, she went to see Nancy Umanoff, executive director of the Morris company, and asked if there was a dancer interested in teaching Parkinson’s patients. “I said, ‘I can raise the money,’ ” Ms. Westheimer recounted. “She said, ‘We have the money.’ ”

Ms. Umanoff offered to provide not only a teacher and the space, but also a pianist, using part of the company’s allocation for community outreach. By 2003 the classes, initially once a month, had so grown in size and popularity that the director of education, Eva Nichols, suggested making them weekly. (They take a break over the summer. The next class starts Sept. 5.)

“It is altruistic on our part,” Ms. Umanoff said. “But what it does for us is give us a sense of engagement in the community in a very deep way, and that gives us greater strength as an institution. And as silly as it sounds, it feels good; the classes positively affect people’s lives. What’s better than that?”

Ms. Westheimer was clear from the start that she wanted a real dance class, and this has proved to be the crucial factor in the class’s popularity. “The most important thing is that people find joy in the movement and a sense of community just as in any dance class,” said Mr. Leventhal, who teaches alongside John Heginbotham, another member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, and Misty Owens, a faculty member at the school.

The classes, which begin seated to increase confidence in balance and stability, move from simple point-and-flex leg exercises to sweeping sequences across the floor. “People will stand up straight, walk with long strides with their heel hitting the ground and swing their arms — all things that are atypical of Parkinson’s,” said Carroll Neesemann, whose disease was diagnosed 11 years ago. “I don’t know if it happens to everyone, but I lose my symptoms when I’m there. And the pleasure of the experience is that it’s not a therapy session. They teach us as if we were any students, and that makes me feel good.”

The structure and content of the class have changed over time, Mr. Heginbotham said, “but the seated structure, the importance of the kind of catchy, familiar music that our pianist, William Wade plays, and the Mark Morris repertory — that has all been there from day one.”

“The big breakthrough,” he added, “was asking the class to improvise; that really freed people up in a serious way. And Misty has developed oppositional exercises that are incredibly successful, so we’re always trying to refine it.”

Ms. Owens, who has also introduced elements of tap dance to the classes, became so interested in the classes’ effects that her thesis for her master of fine arts degree focused on the topic.

“When we repeat a physical task over and over, our bodies learn it,” she said. “That’s called muscle memory, and it’s what dancers rely on. In addition, there is the phenomenon of mirror neurons, when your brain basically imprints what it sees over and over again. The dance classes are incredibly useful for people with Parkinson’s for these reasons. You can be bogged down by symptoms, but if you’ve done it enough, your body will remember the movement with the right cues.”

Neurologists are more cautious about the prospects for long-term improvement. “There is some scientific rationale that exercise helps people with Parkinson’s disease, but not that much,” said Dr. Michele Tagliati, director of the Parkinson’s Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who is interested in the benefits of dance for Parkinson’s sufferers. “So mainstream neurology looks at it as a kind of alternative medicine with short-term benefits.”

The Morris Center now offers a second weekly dance class, run by a former dancer who has Parkinson’s, as well as a weekly music and singing class taught by Mr. Wade. Ms. Westheimer, Mr. Heginbotham and Mr. Leventhal presented their work at the 16th International Congress on Parkinson’s Disease in Berlin in 2005. In October, the teachers will give a workshop at the center that has attracted interest from neurologists in England and Norway.

“There is a constellation of symptoms that don’t respond to dopamine treatment, and we are still not very good at taking care of them,” Dr. Tagliati said. “We don’t know what dance does, exactly, for these, but it’s a complex and fascinating area of research. And the idea of having something that is considered an expression of beauty and youth and coordination to help those whose with an inability to move — well, it’s romantic.”

Correction: September 13, 2007

An article in The Arts on Aug. 25 about dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease omitted part of the name of the Brooklyn medical center whose director, Dr. Ivan Bodis-Wollner, asked his wife, Olie Westheimer, to form a support group that led to the classes. It is the Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders Center in Kings County Hospital Center and SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Getting Their Groove Back, With Help From the Magic of Dance. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe